Friday, May 21, 2010

Did you know that Australia is the 5th most competitive country in the world? At least according to the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, considered “the world’s most renowned and comprehensive annual report on the competitiveness of nations, ranking and analyzing how a nation’s environment creates and sustains the competitiveness of enterprises.

IMD, a company based in Switzerland which has been publishing this study since 1989, compared 58 industrialised and emerging economies on the basis of 327 criteria divided into four groups: Economy Performance, Government Efficiency, Business Efficiency and Infrastructure.

Australia is more competitive than last year jumping from 7th to 5th place; New Zealand however dropped from 15th to 20th this year. The United States which was being ranked first lately dropped to third giving place to Singapore; Hong Kong kept its second place from last year’s rank. The biggest surprise was Taiwan that came from 23rd to 8th place on the rank.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

The new list of occupations for immigration has been released and, as promised by Immigration Minister Chris Evans earlier this year, the list is much smaller, dropping from 400 to only 181 occupations.

Popular occupations between immigrants, such as cooking and hairdressing are out. Doctors, nurses and engineers are still needed, and probably will be for a while. According to the Immigration Department in its new guidelines, “the new Skilled Occupation List (SOL) will be reviewed annually, but is expected to remain stable for some time.”

Australia’s been passing through a discussion about its population growth, which is set to grow 65 percent by 2050, totalling nearly 36 million people. Australia currently has 22 million people.

Australia is the sixth-largest country in the world, with a landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres, while its population is ranked as the 55th highest in the world. Those figures could give you margin to think the country has space for more inhabitants, however it may be arguable once you know that only 6 percent of the country is considered productive and therefore 80 percent of its residents live on the coast.

In fact this is not an easy subject, everybody has a different opinion and in the middle of all of this is the upcoming federal election. The candidates have to show their position about it and they’ll certainly upset one or another, that’s probably the reason why SOL took longer to be released that it was said to.

Anyway, if your occupation is not on the list you still have some options:

- Do a new course on one of the careers on the list (taking the risk of it being cut out as well anytime in the future);

- Get a sponsor. The Graduate Skilled Visa (485) is still available (see conditions here), which gives you the chance to work full time in Australia after completing your studies here. Once you have that visa you can try to find a job to show your talent and impress your employer so they want to sponsor you;

- Finally, you can always marry an Aussie guy or girl… (just kidding on that one, unless you’re really in love, please!)